Former Tencent Hunyuan pre-training lead Yao Xingcheng joins Thinking Machines Lab

Beating AI News Flash: Yao Xingcheng, former head of pretraining for Tencent's Hunyuan large language model, has joined Thinking Machines Lab. The latter was founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Yao Xingcheng left Tencent in July this year, and there were previously rumors that he would join Meta.

Leiphone cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Thinking Machines is paying him significantly more than Tencent. Yao Xingcheng's annual compensation package at Tencent had already reached tens of millions of RMB.

Yao Xingcheng graduated from Tsinghua University's Yao Class. Before joining Tencent, he conducted large model research at Moonshot AI and participated in the development of Kimi K2, Kimi Linear, and others. He is also a co-first author of the classic sentence embedding method SimCSE.